Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that the 2013 mandate to accurately collect and collate data on cancer recurrence is being fully implemented.

The Department is committed to ensuring that data on cancer is complete and of sufficiently high quality. The National Disease Registration Service (NDRS) collects recurrence data for non-primary cancers via data submissions as part of the Cancer Outcomes and Services Dataset (COSD). The COSD has been the national standard for reporting cancer in the National Health Service in England since January 2013, and provides a helpdesk and data liaison service to support data completeness.